Everquest is 13 years old, Norrath opens its gates for free to celebrate

It's funny how things come full circle. I was but a scrawny, nerdy 13-year-old when I played my first massively multiplayer online game (MMO), Everquest. Now, the game itself has turned 13, and (I'm a scrawny, nerdy and bearded 24-year-old) developer Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has made the game free for all to play on its 13th anniversary.

The fact that Everquest lasted for this long without going free-to-play is a wonder in and of itself, given the advent of MMO juggernauts like World of Warcraft and even its younger brother. To thank its players for sticking around for so long (or enticing them to come back), SOE has introduced numerous new features to the game to coincide with its free-to-play push. The most notable of which is "Lucky 13," a series of missions, raid encounters and quests that reflect on the game's storied past.

SOE also introduced several improvements to the Everquest interface, like a Zone Guide that provides a primer on every zone in the game, a Zone Pathfinder that draws paths between zones for players to follow easily and the Hero's Journey. This feature is a book to guide players through several achievements from Level 1 to 85 to keep them on track.

Since it's launch in 1999, Everquest has reached several meaningless interesting milestones, some of which the SOE team has painstakingly gathered. How about the fact that Norrath, technically, is the 179th largest country in the world? However, free players don't exactly get the whole kit and caboodle, since the game now has a tiered subscription system. Either way, it's worth it to either check out what has changed after 13 years or experience one of the MMOs that started it all for the first time.